ALRA Celebrates Two Big Birthdays!
2019 and 2020 are important years for ALRA. Ten years ago, the decision was made to go ahead with a parallel school in Wigan that became ALRA North. Forty years ago, in 1979, the concept of ALRA was brought alive by Caryl Zeigler and Sorrel Carson in a church hall in East Finchley (only moving to the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building in 1983).
ALRA North will be 10 years old in 2020 and ALRA South is 40 in 2019!
So many talented and extraordinary people have trained at ALRA over the years – are you one of them? If you trained at ALRA or supported ALRA over the years, we’d like to invite you to celebrate with us at our special events.
The first of our birthday parties took place on Friday 12th July at ALRA South in the Great Hall. We were delighted to reunite cohorts from the last 40 years over drinks, food, music and a special timeline of events and photographs. There were wonderful speeches from Principal Adrian Hall, Chairman of the Board Harry Cowd, and one of ALRA’s first graduates Alex Timbers.
Next up is the 10th birthday party at ALRA North on Thursday 5th December 6:30-10:30pm. This is free to attend (although you do need to book) and we want to welcome as many of our graduates and friends as possible to our theatre at The Mill.
The celebrations will culminate at a very special event in central London in summer 2020. This event will be announced here and on our social media so watch out for updates!
There are lots of additional ways you can help us celebrate these milestones, by emailing the following to lynn.howes@alra.co.uk:
- Digital copies of any programmes or information you’ve saved
- Your graduating headshot if you still have it – it would be great to add the missing years of past graduates onto our website
- A video like the one below to add to our Big Birthday Film that we will screen at our events
And finally, sign up for the Newsletter and follow us on our social media pages for all the latest information.